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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003
Get the real situation in Israel every day.
Smoking guns
By Robert Rosenberg
January 15, 2003
(An Ariga Update)
One of the most dramatic scenes in the movie All the President's Men, the story of the Woodward and Bernstein investigation of the Watergate scandal, takes place on the lawn outside the front door of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's home in a leafy Washington neighborhood.
The two young reporters show up at Bradlee's door and ask him onto the lawn, to tell him that they are being wiretapped -- by the government.
Bradlee listens to their report about how the Nixon administration is covering up illegal activities, and then he says something along the lines of "the government is subverting the constitution, and meanwhile, the latest polls show that 70 percent of the public will vote for Nixon."
Like Richard Nixon in 1972, Ariel Sharon approached the 2003 Israeli elections certain of victory, and like Richard Nixon in 1972, he wanted more than victory. He wanted a landslide, a vindication not merely of his policies, but of his personality. His victory in 2000 was a default -- nobody could have lost to the failed Ehud Barak. This time Sharon wanted not only to win, he wanted to crush all his opposition inside his own party, the Likud, and whomever Labor and the Left would propel into their leadership. Even that wasn't enough. He wanted to make sure his son would be elected to the Knesset, an ironic imitation of other Middle Eastern leaders who regard their sons as their natural heirs. And most of all he wanted to prove that he could rule Israel with the kind of absolutist power enjoyed by David Ben-Gurion in the earliest days of the state, a power that made Mapai, the precusor of Labor, into the kind of ruling party that even after 25 years in power, the Likud still dreams about, but has never achieved.
Sharon is a greedy man. One can see it in the way he eats. It may not be nice to mention such personal characteristics, but it has always been there, evident for all to see. It's not his metabolism, it's his insatiable appetite. I lunched with him twice, and have seen that appetite at work -- the only time he has appeared to lose weight was for about a year after his wife, Lily, passed away, and I had to admit I felt sorry for him during those few months before the weight returned. I remember her slapping his hand as he reached for his sixth or seventh cinammon roll at a press conference and I remember him finishing off three helpings of food at a Metulla hotel and then licking his finger so he could pick up all the crumbs that had fallen around his plate. These are the kinds of things that don't get reported in polite journalism. But there's something impolite in politics nowadays here -- and elsewhere -- and sometimes it's important to say things bluntly.
It is now two weeks before the Israeli elections. By every measure -- peace, security, economics, the very social fabric of the country -- Ariel Sharon is the worst prime minister since Golda Meir. More than 700 Israelis have been killed on his watch. At least 1,300 Palestinians have been killed, many of them innocent bystanders. He refuses to conduct any political dialogue wth the Palestinians, arguing that before any negotiation with them can begin, all the violence must stop, as if it is possible to stop the violence without negotiations. He also refuses to allow them to travel abroad to conduct any dialogue with the West about how to reform their political institutions.
The economy is in tatters. The newspapers reported today that the demand for new workers is back at levels of 1991. The social fabric of the country, meaning the sense of solidarity between rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, Left and Right, Jew and Arab, northerner and southerner and those who live in the center of the country, has grown so thin that it is transparent.
And Sharon only promises more of the same. In the Orwellian language of his rhetoric, only he knows how to negotiate -- by not negotiating -- only he knows how to bring peace -- by using more and more military force -- only he knows how to bring security -- by using force to prevent the Palestinians from any hope of liberation from the military presence in their towns and villages and using the army to protect the ever-expanding settlements encroaching on the land around Palestinian cities, towns, and villages.
Every day, there is more evidence of corrupiton in the Likud and by Sharon, personally. The police are curious why his son, Gilad, was promised a $3 million commission on a land deal in Greece, when Gilad knows nothing about Greece -- but his father was foreign minister at the time, and is suspected of using his influence to help the deal along. They are also curious about a $15 million loan Gilad took from an old (foreign) family friend to pay back an illegal $1.5 million campaign contribution to Sharon's campaign for the Likud leadership in 1999. The police are also curious about Sharon's other son Omri, who ran the voter registration drive to increase Likud membership, and when asked about the illegal campaign contributions to Sharon's internal party elections in 1999 refused to answer many questions from the police on the grounds they might be self-incriminatory or incriminate others. Omri's involvement in the Likud membership drive and how it led to the vote-buying scandal in the Likud central comittee is also under investigation.
The Likud vote-buying scandal cut into the public support for Sharon's Likud, with the polls showing it losing five Knesset seats a week for the last two weeks. But the polls also show that Sharon remains the most popular politician in the country, in large part because he has somehow succeeded in convincing the public that he had nothing to do with the vote-buying, the Greek island scandal, or now, the mysterious $1.5 million. Asked about these matters, Sharon's answer is always the same: ask my sons. And when pressed on them, he sounds and looks a lot like Bill Clinton waving his finger, or as Sharon says "My son Omri did not have anything to do with those people," people who remain nameless in Sharon's lexicon, but who show up in photographs with him and with Omri elsewhere in the newspaper pages.
The Watergate scandal did not prevent Richard Nixon's re-election in 1972 even though at the heart of the scandal was Nixon's use of the government's law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and CIA, to destroy his political opposition and guarantee his reelection. But eventually, smoking guns were discovered that directly linked Nixon to the crime of conspiriting to obstruct justice, as Nixon tried to cover up lesser crimes. And Nixon was forced to resign.
Will the investigations of the Sharon family's shady dealings prevent his re-election? The polls show the Likud remains in the lead, and the hawks will be re-elected. But like a minute on the clock in a basketball game, two weeks in Israel is a very long time. More smoking guns could pop up, but so can terrorist bombs. But just as enough smoking guns eventually did bring down Nixon, whose megalomanic approach to the power vested in his position as president combined with his paranoia about never being as popular as Jack Kennedy led to Watergate, so will the smoking guns of greed eventually bring down Sharon, if not before the elections, then after.
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